If anyone has seen this, please report back whether the ending remains the same. Because [spoiler]
something REALLY bothers me about a book in which the rape victim becomes, essentially, a rapist. Why the fuck did Sebold put a scene in her book where she possesses another girl's body just to have sex with it?
It looks like The Lovely Bones is basically a Rorschach test -- everyone went in and saw something different and took away a different primary storyline. There's no way a filmmaker could match that.
I wasn't a particular fan of the book in the first place, though. I know it was meant to feel dreamy, but it also felt disjointed and chaotic. I just didn't like it very much.
@limber: I actually never even finished the book. It got so bogged down in the middle where nothing seemed to happen. I skipped ahead and it just didn't move fast enough for me, I gave up. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who wasn't in love with it!
Onscreen, however, The Lovely Bones is a hybrid of unmatching parts-shuffling between thriller, police procedural, family melodrama, and mystical fantasy."
Sorry, that's how the book read to me, and parts of it moved me....the clip I took from Newsweek adds something about "murdered girls" as free spirits as well. Yes, that was in the book--other victims of Harvey of various ages and histories. At one point the women pause and come together, united in grief over the lives and people they'd be taken from. Maybe it's hokey--THAT moved me, but I imagine things that are earnest, slightly sappy, but overall moving in print may come off as full-on sappy in a book.
As for the movie's corny teenage girl's heaven...(from Amazon, with a quote I remember from the book itself:) "Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."'
It sounds like Jackson tried to be loyal to the story, and either he was tone-deaf, or the book itself was just too melodramatic and treacly to work well onscreen.
(Spoilers for book ending below!)
I imagine the ending of the book would rub a lot of people the wrong way too. When I read the book at 12, it struck me as a little dumb...as I got older, and after reading "Lucky," I appreciated the ending more.
There is sex experienced through rape, and then sex as it should be--intimate and pleasurable. Corny supernaturalism aside....I can understand why Sebold would want to end with her heroine "growing up" and experiencing sex as one of the things that makes life pleasurable, instead of as a terrifying, fatal debasement.
I can also imagine that scene losing it's emotional potency very easily when translated on film.
That's really sad that the movie doesn't work. I enjoyed the book (other than the end). I had 10 friends/family members die the year I read it (only one from murder, though), and I found the way that Sebold depicted the grieving process to be very helpful and pretty attune to all of the emotions I was going through. It was nice exploring the idea of purgatory and coming to grips with one's fate, and loss of what might be in my friends' stolen youth. Exploring their emotions, along with Salmon's, allowed me to better come to grips with my own. I think because I connected so deeply with these story arcs in the earlier passages of the book, it made the travesty of the horrible "completion" device of the end a more marked offense (although, I was able ignore because of how much I loved the journey up until that point).
However much they say that this book can't be filmed, a friend of mine wrote this hauntingly beautiful musical adaptation of it that really captured the essence of the book (he wrote the musical Vote! which was in this year's NYC Fringe festival, for any of you New Yorkers). Granted, I only got to see the first act in the Lab showing we did of it, but it still hit those universal notes of loss, innocence, love, pain, and the journey to come to grips with the past that made the book the literary hit that it was. I thought that Jackson could do this, too, but I guess not. I would have liked to see Mira Nair's adaptation of the work. I loved how she approached abuse in Monsoon Wedding, and her use of color seems like it would illicit the dream-like quality of the book.
Uhm, LOTR is not juvenile. Not the books, and not the films. Male-dominated, sure...but you can't tell me Sam and Frodo don't have some incredibly moving moments that are anything but testosterone-y.
@tiredfairy: "Uhm" something can have non-"testosterone-y" moments and still be juvenile. Not everyone has to like what you like. I can't speak for the reviewer, but I can easily imagine someone finding things like LOTR's black/white morality and heavy-handed plot childish. Also the magical horsie and the talking trees.
And I'm not sure it's effective to quote an unbelievably tired meme while you're talking about things not being childish. Seriously, that crap is bannable on every site I go to - why does it persist here?
@Kajj: Oh, good grief. I said nothing about having to like it, only that LOTR is not "juvenile". It's an incredibly nuanced story, whether you or the reviewer above actually like it. Not liking something has no relevance to whether it's complex or not. I'm not a big fan of The Godfather, but I understand why it's cited all the time.
The morality isn't actually that black/white, unless you're not paying attention. There's no magical horse. And Ents aren't trees. If all you see in that is something "juvenile" then that's you. And it's not "male driven" the way, say, Die Hard is. For a film reviewer to be that obtuse is just silly.
I don't know...why do you post here if think using a shorthand phrase that's not serious should be bannable?
@fatmonalisa: I'm not sure I'd agree, unless we're talking about scale. LOTR is obviously a modern epic, though. But I'll take that over Charlton Heston chewing scenery.
@tiredfairy: I come for the intelligent discourse, which is why tweeny posts like yours stick out like sore thumbs. Ents may not technically be trees but the whole point is that they look like them. The whole "it's not a [mundane thing] it's a [contrived fantasy-language word for same]!" thing is something non-fantasy readers find very trying and one of the obstacles preventing fantasy from gaining the literary legitimacy its fans so rabidly argue for, just so you know. And I'm not sure you've actually read the books if you don't know about the magically-fast and oh-so-pretty horse. Blindly rushing to the internet to defend your pet fantasy world against any slight is pretty juvenile too, especially if you do so in lolcat language.
I don't see why you get to flatly declare your opinion as fact while raging about critics doing the same thing. Overlong and under-edited isn't the same thing as "complex," and if you honestly think a story about magical warriors and their magical swords is "not male-driven" just because the author threw in a few princesses, I have to wonder why you post here.
Maybe you weren't paying attention to what the critic was actually trying to say there. LOTR is a book written from an unequivocally male point of view, and the movies were designed for and marketed to male audiences. Any female fans were incidental from the studio's perspective, same as pretty much any other blockbuster.
I am one of the few people I know who loved this book, because it enveloped me with such a crushing sadness the entire time I was reading it. Everyone else said it was too tragic. I was very skeptical that any director would be able to recreate the feeling ti gave me, but I still plan on seeing it, to see how it measures up to what I envisioned with my mind. However, I'm very much of the belief that some books are simply too complex to be made into films.
@TheExperience: My mother absolutely hated it. She said only one thing was clear to her: the writer had never lost a child. I read part of it, but I couldn't get into it. I didn't really relate to how her family dealt with her death, either.
I don't know if the movie could really capture that feeling, even if I didn't much care for the book.
@boxspelunker: The writer was raped at 19...I think Sebold identified with Susie more than the parents, so I can see why they would ring false. In "Lucky" she had bumps in her relationship with her parents that were thrown into stark relief during the ordeal of the trial.
No offense to your mom; I'm guessing she judged Sebold based on Abigail Salmon, who had an affair afterward (that struck me as a little tawdry and unconvincing too, though)?
Do you need to experience the loss of a loved one to write about grief convincingly?
@maude_flanders: Yeah, she came off as really judgmental of her parents and a lot of people in Lucky--I mean, I know she had issues, I just found it kind of hard to relate to her as a person. She just came off as really abrasive to me. I always hate admitting that b/c so many people talk about how touching the story is which left me cold. Sorry if i've offended anyone here bringing ths up...
@maude_flanders: I didn't really talk about the book much with my mom. She doesn't like to talk about the death of my sister, so relating that to the book was unpleasant for her. She said she didn't like how the parents reacted; it was too far removed from it, so I'm not sure about the affair thing.
No, I don't think you necessarily have to experience what you're writing about to be convincing. However, you had better be an excellent writer if you're writing about something as personal and intense as losing a loved one. Writing about rape when you've never experienced it would be really difficult, I would imagine, and no matter how good you are, someone isn't going to find it relatable. I just didn't like her writing style, really, and I couldn't connect with the characters. I didn't finish the book, so I didn't even know about the affair thing. I would probably react differently now that I'm older, but when I read it, it just wasn't for me.
I saw rough cut of it in the spring as a focus group showing. I haven't read the book, so I didn't have any ideas going into it. And I am not a Peter Jackson fan. I hated LOTR. And King Kong. God do I hate King Kong.
Having said that, I really liked The Lovely Bones. I thought Stanley Tucci was really creepy and the tension was nicely done. Some of the"In Between" stuff is a little silly, but it moves quickly and it is beautifully flimed. For what it's worth, I'd say give it a shot.
@Phyllis Nefler: The last 45 minutes of King Kong are absolutely fantastic, in my opinion. Problem is, I had to sit through nearly two hours of an entirely different mediocre movie to get to them.
(Then again, I am a sucker for animal movies and am prone to vertigo.)
@Phyllis Nefler: Well, it's not like you don't know how the story ends, what with being a sentient creature over the past 80 years.
Skip to the point where they get to the Empire State building, and I assure you, you'll appreciate it. Absolutely jaw-dropping visuals, and on a par with Old Yeller for a tearjerking animal movie.
Wait, you're not the commenter who slept through it. Still good advice.
Call me a hater, but I'm not surprised that Peter Jackson has produced yet another CGI-ridden trainwreck. The man has little-to-no idea on how to tell a story without cluttering it with special F/X. Heavenly Creatures is the only film of his which evidences some semblance of emotional depth/complexity.
@Understater: See, I had hopes that this WOULD be like "Heavenly Creatures" - because it is about loss, and teenage girls, and partially exists in a dreamworld. But I suppose I'm not surprised, either.
I reread the book a few months ago and I didn't fall head over heels like the first time I read it (in high school), but I still felt the power in a few particular scenes, especially in the earlier chapters. It's very evocative and she really caught what it feels like to be a teenage girl, through both Susie and especially Lindsay. I also loved the idea of heaven in the book, and that Susie's heaven was full of dogs.
I was kind of sad to hear that they toned down the book's content. The rape scene is difficult to read, but I feel like it's kind of necessary to understand the absolute horror that her family is going through.
BOOK SPOILER: Also, what is the mother character going to do without the affair? I felt like that was an important storyline, the different ways the family reacted to Susie's death. Dad becomes obsessive, Lindsay becomes incredibly strong, Mom has the affair to numb herself. Plus, I really like the character of Len and I excited when I heard he was being played by Michael "Christufuh" Imperioli. :(
@katie.scarlett.o'hara: BOOK SPOILER: I haven't seen the movie yet, but I assume they also took out the part where she comes back through Ruth and the shower scene goes down?
I am so dissappointed to hear such bad reviews. That book touched me so much when I read it and I was only 13. Arguably too young to fully understand it...
A movie from a year or so back that ran along many of the same themes (a period piece about children and violence, supernatural dread) was "Let the Right One In". A really chilling movie that was so lo-fi and subtle in it's depictions of the utterly horrific that it was more like a whisper than a scream.
If you want to see a movie that handles these topics with a lot less glossiness and oodles of dark heart I can't recommend it enough.
@moifauxmail: AND, be sure to read the book. A sublime work, and extra creepy, if you like that kind of stuff. It's an almost pitch-perfect vampire story. No sparkles, sorry.
I really enjoyed the book and it doesn't surprise me in the least that the movie fails to recreate the same aura. One of the most engaging things about the book to me was how it suggestively engaged you in your own concepts, questions and memories of death. My mom had recently died and so of course I pondered what her heaven might be like. I thought about the friends I'd lost over the years to the tragedy of AIDS and imagined where and with who they might spend time revisiting Earth. These are personal experiences that would be hard to initiate in a film and I certainly wouldn't see myself contemplating in a crowded theater. As lovely as bones might be when intimately held in hand, when displayed theatrically in a public square, they rarely hold the same fascination.
@hughman: I loved how heaven was portrayed in the book. If there is such a thing, I really hope it's as specific as Susie's. I criiiiiiied when she met her old dog.
I was curious why this was made into a movie in the first place. A 14 year old's rape and murder is impossible to depict on screen, and the chronicling of a family broken by the tragedy is far too oppressive for the movie-going atmosphere.
Did Peter Jackson feel that he needed a challenge?
@NellMood: It's general trash literature. I think of it like CSI. There's no real depth but lately everyone is in such need of excitement! and death! and solve the crime! It's really pretty stupid. I thought everything was written in a faux pretentious style that is quite meaningless as a whole.
@fatmonalisa: I liked the book until the point where she came back in her friend's body to have sex with a guy she knew from school. I thought that was tacky, and unbelievable. It's like really? REALLY? A rape/murder victim has a moment in a lifetime(deathtime?) to be on earth again, and she uses that moment to f@ck some dude? No way!
@Plum-Pie: if you look into Alice Sebold much, she has a really intimate background with stranger rape. This book is her playing "what if" with the situation that she endured. For more information, read her book Lucky. Her moral - she was Lucky to still be alive. She wrote Lucky while she was writing Lovely Bones because she needed to sort out her own experience to write the what if scenario.
On the other hands, i would agree that her newest book (______ Moon) was trying too hard.
@another_uncreative_name: I actually liked The Lovely Bones, but The Almost Moon was awful. I will finish just about anything, but I put that one down after three pages.
@NtotheItotheCKY: A thousand times this-- as I was reading that section, I wanted to yell aloud, "Tell your dad where your body is!! Give him some peace!" After that ridiculous sex scene, I was really angry about the time and energy I'd put into reading the book.
Perhaps this is off topic, but I'm a little undone by Rachel Weisz's being cast as the MOTHER of a teenager. Wow.
I haven't seen the movie, but do these reviews mean anything? I tend to find no correlation between the reviews of a movie and my actual enjoyment of it.
@GGobsessed: She's 39, so she would have had her at 25. Not really that strange. (Also, how many years ago was About a Boy made, and her son was almost a teenager in that.)
12/12/09
something REALLY bothers me about a book in which the rape victim becomes, essentially, a rapist. Why the fuck did Sebold put a scene in her book where she possesses another girl's body just to have sex with it?
12/12/09
I wasn't a particular fan of the book in the first place, though. I know it was meant to feel dreamy, but it also felt disjointed and chaotic. I just didn't like it very much.
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Sorry, that's how the book read to me, and parts of it moved me....the clip I took from Newsweek adds something about "murdered girls" as free spirits as well. Yes, that was in the book--other victims of Harvey of various ages and histories. At one point the women pause and come together, united in grief over the lives and people they'd be taken from. Maybe it's hokey--THAT moved me, but I imagine things that are earnest, slightly sappy, but overall moving in print may come off as full-on sappy in a book.
As for the movie's corny teenage girl's heaven...(from Amazon, with a quote I remember from the book itself:) "Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."'
It sounds like Jackson tried to be loyal to the story, and either he was tone-deaf, or the book itself was just too melodramatic and treacly to work well onscreen.
(Spoilers for book ending below!)
I imagine the ending of the book would rub a lot of people the wrong way too. When I read the book at 12, it struck me as a little dumb...as I got older, and after reading "Lucky," I appreciated the ending more.
There is sex experienced through rape, and then sex as it should be--intimate and pleasurable. Corny supernaturalism aside....I can understand why Sebold would want to end with her heroine "growing up" and experiencing sex as one of the things that makes life pleasurable, instead of as a terrifying, fatal debasement.
I can also imagine that scene losing it's emotional potency very easily when translated on film.
12/11/09
However much they say that this book can't be filmed, a friend of mine wrote this hauntingly beautiful musical adaptation of it that really captured the essence of the book (he wrote the musical Vote! which was in this year's NYC Fringe festival, for any of you New Yorkers). Granted, I only got to see the first act in the Lab showing we did of it, but it still hit those universal notes of loss, innocence, love, pain, and the journey to come to grips with the past that made the book the literary hit that it was. I thought that Jackson could do this, too, but I guess not. I would have liked to see Mira Nair's adaptation of the work. I loved how she approached abuse in Monsoon Wedding, and her use of color seems like it would illicit the dream-like quality of the book.
12/11/09
Film fail.
12/12/09
And I'm not sure it's effective to quote an unbelievably tired meme while you're talking about things not being childish. Seriously, that crap is bannable on every site I go to - why does it persist here?
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12/12/09
The morality isn't actually that black/white, unless you're not paying attention. There's no magical horse. And Ents aren't trees. If all you see in that is something "juvenile" then that's you. And it's not "male driven" the way, say, Die Hard is. For a film reviewer to be that obtuse is just silly.
I don't know...why do you post here if think using a shorthand phrase that's not serious should be bannable?
12/12/09
12/12/09
I don't see why you get to flatly declare your opinion as fact while raging about critics doing the same thing. Overlong and under-edited isn't the same thing as "complex," and if you honestly think a story about magical warriors and their magical swords is "not male-driven" just because the author threw in a few princesses, I have to wonder why you post here.
Maybe you weren't paying attention to what the critic was actually trying to say there. LOTR is a book written from an unequivocally male point of view, and the movies were designed for and marketed to male audiences. Any female fans were incidental from the studio's perspective, same as pretty much any other blockbuster.
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12/11/09
I don't know if the movie could really capture that feeling, even if I didn't much care for the book.
12/12/09
No offense to your mom; I'm guessing she judged Sebold based on Abigail Salmon, who had an affair afterward (that struck me as a little tawdry and unconvincing too, though)?
Do you need to experience the loss of a loved one to write about grief convincingly?
12/12/09
12/12/09
No, I don't think you necessarily have to experience what you're writing about to be convincing. However, you had better be an excellent writer if you're writing about something as personal and intense as losing a loved one. Writing about rape when you've never experienced it would be really difficult, I would imagine, and no matter how good you are, someone isn't going to find it relatable. I just didn't like her writing style, really, and I couldn't connect with the characters. I didn't finish the book, so I didn't even know about the affair thing. I would probably react differently now that I'm older, but when I read it, it just wasn't for me.
12/11/09
Having said that, I really liked The Lovely Bones. I thought Stanley Tucci was really creepy and the tension was nicely done. Some of the"In Between" stuff is a little silly, but it moves quickly and it is beautifully flimed. For what it's worth, I'd say give it a shot.
12/12/09
(Then again, I am a sucker for animal movies and am prone to vertigo.)
12/12/09
Maybe I'll swipe my husbands DVD and skip ahead.
12/12/09
Skip to the point where they get to the Empire State building, and I assure you, you'll appreciate it. Absolutely jaw-dropping visuals, and on a par with Old Yeller for a tearjerking animal movie.
Wait, you're not the commenter who slept through it. Still good advice.
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12/11/09
I was kind of sad to hear that they toned down the book's content. The rape scene is difficult to read, but I feel like it's kind of necessary to understand the absolute horror that her family is going through.
BOOK SPOILER: Also, what is the mother character going to do without the affair? I felt like that was an important storyline, the different ways the family reacted to Susie's death. Dad becomes obsessive, Lindsay becomes incredibly strong, Mom has the affair to numb herself. Plus, I really like the character of Len and I excited when I heard he was being played by Michael "Christufuh" Imperioli. :(
12/11/09
I am so dissappointed to hear such bad reviews. That book touched me so much when I read it and I was only 13. Arguably too young to fully understand it...
12/12/09
And same here. It seemed way cheesier when I read it earlier this year though.
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If you want to see a movie that handles these topics with a lot less glossiness and oodles of dark heart I can't recommend it enough.
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Did Peter Jackson feel that he needed a challenge?
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Brilliant!
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I'm not sure why people love it so, but if it's the young female protagonist as a rape or violence victim/survivor, I can think of many better books.
12/11/09
On the other hands, i would agree that her newest book (______ Moon) was trying too hard.
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I haven't seen the movie, but do these reviews mean anything? I tend to find no correlation between the reviews of a movie and my actual enjoyment of it.
12/11/09